Chapter 1: What is cuneiform and why is it significant?
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You'll also unlock hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a brand new release every single week covering everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe. Over 5,000 years ago, in the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, one of the greatest technological leaps in human history occurred.
One created with neither stone nor gold, but with clay. This is cuneiform, the first ever writing system known to archaeology that would spread across Mesopotamia and beyond. a writing system preserved today on thousands of fascinating tablets that continue to reveal more and more secrets about these ancient civilizations.
From simple pictograms used to count jars of beer in ancient Sumer, to the complex wedges that told the story of the Great Flood long before the Bible, cuneiform became the script of civilizations like the Babylonians, the Assyrians and the Persians.
Today we're joined by friend of the podcast, the one, the only, the legend, Dr Irving Finkel, Senior Assistant Keeper at the British Museum and one of the world's leading experts on cuneiform. Irving, it is such a pleasure to have you on the show. Delighted to be here.
It has been too long.
Let me tell you. Yes, it's been much too long. And the first time having you in our... Luxurious studio environment, I think they would call it. Bookcase. Plants. Carpet, the whole works. A cup of coffee for you as well. And we wanted to make you feel right at home for this topic. Absolutely relaxed and happy to talk to you.
And to talk about cuneiform, which is, and forgive me if I'm incorrect, but this is the oldest writing script known to archaeology.
That is exactly what it is. This cuneiform writing system, when you look at what comes to us from the ancient world, and the very ancient world, the cuneiform script, which the earliest things are probably at the end of about 4000 BC, 3000, maybe even older than that, They're the earliest pieces that we can say are writing. They're part of the history of writing.
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Chapter 2: How did cuneiform evolve from pictograms to complex writing?
So you see it surviving on several different, very durable materials, actually.
that old Persian situation is rather remarkable because of what happened as a result of it. Because in Mesopotamia, as you say, most bits of cuneiform were written on bits of clay. This is the standard thing. Over 3,000 years of time, we have these clay things. But at the same time, the kings of Babylonia and Assyria, if they wanted to make a big proclamation or a statement like a law code...
or they wanted to decorate their palaces with statements about how marvellous they were, they adapted the signs which are usually pressed into clay that they could be carved into stone. So there was a long tradition of stone inscriptions running side by side with clay inscriptions in the heyday of Mesopotamian culture. Now, the old Persian kings...
Darius and co., they decided they wanted to have proclamations of their own kind to write their old Persian language. And in the mountain situation that you describe, they did it rather splendidly because they had a flattened face of rock where they wrote the same triumphant, boastful description in their old Persian cuneiform and in Babylonian cuneiform and in Elamite cuneiform.
So this was a tour de force. What's intriguing is that the Persian cuneiform was not like Babylonian or Sumerian cuneiform at all. Because to write proper cuneiform, you need about a thousand different signs. But when they wrote Old Persian, they more or less had an alphabet made up of signs, made out of wedges, cuneiform wedges like the normal Babylonian or Sumerian signs, but very simplified.
And they took the idea of the wedge shape in different combinations to make 26 or 28 characters like an alphabet to write their language. So this great thing up on the mountain, it looked at first like, oh no, another horrible cuneiform inscription we can't read.
But because people knew the Persian language and they knew Persian literature, there were phenomena about the Old Persian inscription which opened up the decipherment of the Old Persian cuneiform script.
And what turned out what was so marvellous is that the next column, the Babylonian one, and the one after that, the Elamite one from Iran, were translations of the text written in the Old Persian rather simple script into mainstream cuneiform, in Babylonian, or Elamite.
So because they could read the first one, which was really a bit of a lollipop once they got the hang of it, once they'd done that and they found that the name Darius was written Dari-ar-wu-ush, and it was king of kings, king of the mighty king or something, and they saw in the old Persian that these things were repeated, and it must be the king and his father with all his epithets and the grandfather with all his epithets, and they read the old Persian eventually because the language was still alive.
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Chapter 3: Which civilizations used cuneiform as their writing system?
And when that border is crossed, from realistic drawings, or what people like to call curvy linear, into cuneiform, where they're reduced to straight edges within the whole of the picture, the individual sign picture, then you get the appearance of cuneiform. And that took place probably at the beginning of the third millennium.
So originally the drawings, what you would do, very simply, if you want to do a river, you draw two parallel lines. If you want to do a woman, you do a triangle with a hole in the middle. If you wanted to do an animal, you do the animal head. All those sorts of things, very simple. And in fact, if you look...
at a list of early pictographs and compare it with the sort of drawings that children do when they're about two and a half or three when they first try to reduce the universe around them to recognizable symbols there's something common so if a child draws a teapot it will be a bit like a pictographic sign to represent the vessel that you might have on an early tablet
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It's a bit trifle anachronistic, but we can let that go.
Hey, look, we're trying new things here. But I have one particular tablet up here. Yes. Now, do you recognise this tablet?
I do recognise that tablet. So it's made of, firstly, we can see very high quality clay, right? And it's the kind of clay that the pictures which are in it are sharp and well-defined. And it's been ruled into boxes, horizontal. So it's some kind of administrative document where items are listed together with quantities of them.
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Chapter 4: How did cuneiform writing spread across different cultures?
Do not show this to anybody from Uruk.
Yeah.
Not allowed. So, you know, when you read the cuneiform, it just looks like cuneiform. But when you suddenly hear the voice and someone wagging a finger, don't let those bastards get hold of this. This is our stuff. They're not allowed to. So it's not copyright for money. But nevertheless, there is a sort of guild or some such conception keeping a rivalry among them free.
But even given that, you don't get sign forms going off at a mad tangent. So if they don't like us, we'll invent a sign for this. It never happens. And it's easy to overlook this point. But I don't think it's easy to overemphasize it because it seems to me beyond doubt that this must be a central truth about this script, that there was a control from day one and it was a self-regulating system.
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I guess, going back to what we were talking about on an overarching point, with the evolution of those signs, looking at a pictogram or one from the Sumerian times and then one from, let's say, Ashurbanipal's library in the 1st century BC, you wouldn't be able to realize… Except in some cases.
Once in a while you might have an inkling of it or even identify it, but in general that's true. So there are other things about this cuneiform writing system which are important because just as you have a sign for beer and its being one sign, the principle runs that a given sign can sometimes have multiple uses.
Right.
And this is what bewilders people who throw up their career as computer programmers and shopkeepers and decide to do a seriology at university, when they discover this series of unfortunate events that lies ahead of them. Because a given cuneiform sign can have multiple uses. That's to say, it can function with more than one meaning when you look at it. more than one semantic significance.
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